If you’re still selling on emotions, you’re using outdated techniques.
“People buy emotionally,” said the veteran salesperson. I was talking to this salesman at a regional association conference; I’d given a workshop that day on hiring salespeople. He continued, “So you’ve got to form relationships with customers. I like to play golf with them, I buy them game tickets, and so forth. That makes me their friend, and then they feel like they have to buy from me.”
Welcome to successful selling in 1975. Admittedly, this salesperson’s career had spanned a lot of eras, and I have no doubt that he had his share of success – but in talking with him, I found that he was on his third job in five years. That suggests that his success was mostly in his rear view mirror – and that’s probably because he hasn’t updated his selling methods. There was a time when good golfing was a prime sales skill. Not anymore. Selling today has a new paradigm, and you have to understand where emotion fits.
What we know about the history of mankind is simple – emotion trumps reason until information becomes commonly available and accepted. Once upon a time, people thought the world was flat. Now, whether you believe that the person who disproved this was Christopher Columbus or Leif Ericsson, the fact is that until it was commonly disproved, explorers had a real fear of sailing off the edge of the earth. Once it was disproved, reason trumped fear (the emotion). People knew that you would not sail off the edge of the earth (and yes, I’m aware of the Flat Earth Society; no need to email me). So how does this impact selling?
Selling has been changed more in the past 10-15 years than in the previous century – and it has to do with the ready availability of information. Once upon a time, salespeople were pretty much the exclusive repositories and communicators of information regarding the features, benefits, and pricing of products and services (at least in the B2B market). Hence, customers relied heavily on the trust and the relationship with the salesperson. This was not only to acquire the information they needed, but to believe the information. Hence, it was necessary for salespeople to form an emotional tie to the customer so that the salesperson had credibility in the customer’s eyes.
This led to numerous sales tactics that were designed to manipulate the customer’s emotions; trying to establish fake rapport through fish-on-the-wall selling; defensive selling to ‘prevent’ the customer from buying elsewhere; excessive expense and entertainment budgets; and other tactics designed to form (or fake) an emotional bond as the gateway to selling. “People buy emotionally, then attempt to justify the purchase logically” was the watchword.
The Internet – and its ready access to information of all types – has turned this dynamic on its head. No longer do customers have to rely on salespeople to learn about the products and services that they need. When buying, let’s say, a new machine for a production plant, the customer can go online and learn about the features and benefits of the machine, compare competitive items, and get an idea of pricing – all without meeting with a salesperson.
Combined with this dynamic has come the phenomenon of “right-sizing” of companies. One of the big trends of the 90s and 2000’s was the elimination of thick layers of middle management and administrative help from numerous companies, large and small. This increased the workload on the managers and owners who remained. In turn, the time to do things like spend an afternoon on the golf course has been greatly reduced. One salesperson that I know well told me recently that, during the summers, he used to play customer golf twice a week. This summer, he played about ten rounds of customer golf in total, because his contacts don’t have the free time anymore.
So there has been a fundamental change in our client base. Our contacts now have less free time – and more access to the information they need. This has changed our burden. No longer are we supposed to be buddies first, and resources second. Now, as throughout human history, logic trumps emotion when it comes to the B2B buying decision. Fail to understand that at your own peril.
Nowadays, instead of asking of salespeople, “Will you be a buddy?”, customers are asking, “How can you make my business work better?” If you don’t have an answer to that question, you’re probably not going to be very successful.
There is, of course, a role for understanding and dealing with emotion in the sale – but it’s secondary. I’ll get to that next time.
